Paride Zajotti (1793–1843) was an Italian literary critic and a judicial official in the service of the Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia.
Zajotti proposed to distinguish between two kinds historical novels: 'novels of facts and personages' and 'novels of times and mores'.
The other kind, in which fact and fiction are mixed in the lives of real people, Zajotti regarded as inferior and ultimately wrong.
His opinion was that The Betrothed was an uneasy mixture of the two, with Manzoni in effect trying, with some success, to rectify his own initial bias towards the second kind.
What befalls Renzo and Lucia may seem to be the main concern only to those who wish to apply the usual norms to his novel: but careful reflection will show that its first objective is to describe the course of civil society in the Duchy of Milan at the beginning of the seventeenth century.